Militia killing gays in Iraq, rights group says

IRAQ

Militiamen are torturing and killing gay Iraqi men with impunity in a systematic campaign that has spread from Baghdad to several other cities, a prominent human rights group said in a report.

Human Rights Watch called on the Iraqi government to act urgently to stop the abuses, warning that so-called social cleansing poses a new threat to security even as other violence recedes.

The bodies of several gay men were found in Baghdad's main Shiite district of Sadr City earlier this year with the Arabic words for "pervert" and "puppy" - considered derogatory terms for homosexuals in Iraq - written on their chests.

The New York-based advocacy group said the threats and abuses have since spread to the cities of Kirkuk, Najaf and Basra, although the practice remains concentrated in the capital.

"Murders are committed with impunity, admonitory in intent, with corpses dumped in garbage or hung as warnings on the street," the 67-page report said.

Reliable numbers weren't available, Human Rights Watch said, blaming a combination of the failure of authorities to investigate such crimes and the stigma preventing families from reporting the deaths. But it cited a well-informed U.N. official as saying in April that the death toll was probably "in the hundreds."

The campaign has been largely blamed on Shiite extremists who have long targeted behavior deemed un-Islamic, beating and even killing women for not wearing veils and bombing liquor stores.

Shiite militiamen have for the most part stopped their violence against rival Sunnis after radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's forces were routed by U.S. and Iraqi forces last year and declared a cease-fire. But the report indicated they were conducting a less publicized campaign of social cleansing.

An Iraqi Interior Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue with the media, acknowledged there has been a sharp escalation in attacks against gay men this year by suspected Shiite extremists.

Homosexuals have been targeted throughout the Iraq war, but the killings appear to have intensified as improvements in overall security led gay men to begin going out to cafes in groups and socializing in public, according to the report.

Human Rights Watch accused authorities of doing nothing to stop the killings and warned that reflected an overall inability to protect the people.

The report was based on interviews with more than 50 Iraqi men who identified themselves as gay as well as Iraqi human rights activists, journalists and doctors.